[luckylion]

> US companies make money from stories about Chinese weather balloons. They lose money when horrific things like this happen.

The carrier will lose money. But a news company would make money, wouldn't they? Bad news is good news after all, and environmental disasters are bad news.

[freen]

Likely there is considerable overlap in ownership between the handful of railway companies that dominate the market and handful of media companies that dominate the market.

[whatshisface]

Plus advertisers (which could include chemical plants etc) are their clients.

[JumpCrisscross]

> advertisers (which could include chemical plants etc) are their clients

The closest in the top 200 is Berkshire Hathaway [1], because they train. Also, this media hypothesis predicts Google, Pfizer, Amazon and Walmart are media darlings. (And that Apple is not.)

[1] https://advertisers.mediaradar.com/Top_Print_Advertisers

[WeylandYutani]

I think jingoistic China bashing pays better than putting the spotlight on America's various problems and shortcomings.

They did it in the 1970s and aside from brilliant Hollywood movies it wasn't a good decade for America. The less introspection the better as far as the media and political interests are concerned.

[mc32]

How is it jingoistic when China is flying warplanes over Taiwan and their media is now making claims the US has flown 10 balloons over their territory and supposedly were about to shoot down one of them and feign ignorance about the ones they sent over to us? Or are you saying both sides are being jingoistic?

[TylerE]

Trains derail all the time. It’s dog bites man, not man bites dog.

[xbmcuser]

Your dismissal make the ops point. The train derailment is not the news the environmental disaster that is happening because of it is the news. But you only know about the train derailment not much about the environmental disaster which should have been milked for views by the media normally.

[TylerE]

No, I know about it because I read it on the my times the day after it happened.

[jessaustin]

It isn't always "Chernobyl in Ohio", as locals are calling it. Although, that is becoming more common. If only the rail industry were regulated... maybe we need to dig up Teddy Roosevelt?

[IIAOPSW]

The rail industry is regulated. In certain ways over and in certain ways under. Eg, there's very little sense to the requirements a passenger train needs to reach to run on the same rails as freight, and Europe does it safely all the time.

[TylerE]

Not so much a matter of safety as that it’s the freight railroads that own the rails, whereas is most of Europe the infrastructure is mostly government owned, or in some cases was and is now (sorta) privatized but still under a sort of open access model.

[IIAOPSW]

That's a different, orthogonal issue. Look it up there's a bunch of tedious FRA rules about crash-worthiness which Europe doesn't have. It makes the trains which can legally run needlessly expensive and they wear out the tracks faster. The rules don't apply to metros and subways, but if the tracks have any switch anywhere connecting to the national network then FRA rules apply to the whole system. The result is that planners can't extend their metro via shared freight corridors. There are plenty of regulations already, and in some cases they are clearly counterproductive. Proposing to solve things by putting more regs on the pile is a dubious proposition.

[wkat4242]

Do metros in the US even use the same gauge as trains? Here in Europe they're almost always smaller gauge so sharing isn't an option.

The exception here in Barcelona is Line 1 which is a wider gauge than all the other lines, for historical reasons though it doesn't share any tracks (but lays right beside the train ones at some stations)

[jessaustin]

It isn't regulated in ways that matter. We're down to five Class I American freight railroads. (So we're not quite to Klobuchar's monopoly board... just wait!) Their networks overlap even less than one might think, so there is effectively no competition. Asshole billionaires like Warren Buffett aren't even trying to provide good service, because they figure they make more money burying the organizations under mountains of debt, which is why they have paid the Biden administration to crush their union employees. Over the last several decades, rail freight charges and derailments have exploded while the amount of freight shipped has actually dropped. That's one of the main reasons we have to contend with so many semi trucks on our highways.

In many industries, commercial competitors discover when regulators have shirked their duties. In the rail industry, with no effective competition, many theoretical regulations are not actually enforced. This problem has gotten worse over time.

Your concerns about Amtrak may be valid, but they are orthogonal to the topic at hand.